Radioactive

Robert Winn had never witnessed anything quite like this. On a beautiful September day in 1931, he called upon Eben Byers at his beachfront home in Southampton, New York. Winn had been tasked with interviewing the former golf champion for a case by the Federal Trade Commission against William J.A. Bailey, a quack doctor who produced a concoction called Radithor. Byers had been persuaded to try it, and the man Winn walked in to see was much closer to a ghost.

Once sporting an athletic frame, Byers weighed less than 100 pounds, his skin cast in a shade of sickly gray. His entire upper jaw was gone, as was most of his lower jaw, a last-ditch effort by doctors to save him. His head was covered in abscesses, open sores that often went down to Byers’ skull, if not deeper. While still mentally capable, he could hardly speak. Within six months, Winn’s star witness would be dead. How could this fate have befallen the former U.S. Amateur champion?

Ebenezer MacBurney Byers entered the world on April 12, 1880. He was the fourth of five children born to Alexander M. and Martha Byers of Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, today Pittsburgh’s North Side. The Byers family was among the area’s wealthy elite; Alexander served as the head of the A.M. Byers Company, one of the nation’s largest steel and wrought-iron pipe firms, located on Pittsburgh’s South Side and later down the Ohio River in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. 

The Byers were some of the first members of the newly formed Allegheny Country Club in 1895. Young Eben was introduced to the game there and went to boarding school in New Hampshire before attending Yale University. There, Byers blossomed into a fantastic player. In 1899, he finished runner-up in the annual Yale Championship tournament, before taking the title the following year and setting the course record in the process. Earlier in 1900, he teamed up with fellow collegiate star Charles Hitchcock Jr. to play the legendary Harry Vardon at New Haven Country Club during Vardon’s famous American tour that year. While the boys lost to the future six-time Open champion, Vardon accurately predicted that Byers would turn into a “first-class player.”

The year he graduated from Yale, in 1901, Byers won his first of six Western Pennsylvania Amateur Championships, defeating future U.S. Amateur Champion and local rival William C. Fownes Jr. of Oakmont at the Pittsburgh Golf Club. He also finished runner-up in the 1901 Western Pennsylvania Open.

In 1902, he successfully defended the West Penn Amateur title and claimed his first West Penn Open Championship, both on the new Allegheny Country Club links in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. He also won the Allegheny Men’s Invitational that June, one of the premier amateur golf championships in the country during this era. In the U.S. Amateur, Byers advanced all the way to the final against Louis James, defeating the likes of defending champion Walter Travis and future U.S. Amateur champion H. Chandler Egan along the way. On a waterlogged Glen View course, Byers’ putting failed him, and the title went to James.

The next year, Byers made another run at the Havemeyer Trophy. He successfully maneuvered his way through the field, meeting Walter Travis in the final. Travis, hoping to atone for his loss to Byers the previous year, may not have caught Byers at his best. According to the Pittsburgh Post, the family’s South Side steel mills caught fire the night before their match, resulting in $20,000 of damage (roughly $700,000 today). Byers fell to Travis, 5&4.

The next couple seasons were mediocre by the standards Byers had set. In 1904, he played in his first British Amateur Championship, losing in the round of 32 and also in the round of 16 of the U.S. Amateur. The following year, he reached the quarterfinals of the U.S. Amateur, but his run ended there. Despite his individual struggles, he did partner with Fownes, George Ormiston and Dr. D.P. Fredericks to win the 1905 Olympic Cup at Chicago Golf Club, which was contested by 11 golf associations from across North America, including the Metropolitan, Western and Philadelphia teams.

In 1906, Byers returned to form and embarked on a career year. He started by claiming the West Penn Open and Amateur titles again, both on his home course at Allegheny. He finished runner-up in the Metropolitan Amateur Championship at St. Andrews Golf Club in New York, losing to future U.S. Amateur champion Jerome Travers in the final, 3&1. 

The 1906 U.S. Amateur Championship was contested at the now-defunct Englewood Golf Club, set at the base of what is now the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. Byers traversed the field with relative ease, setting up a semifinal showdown with his old rival, Travis, who’d won medalist honors in qualifying. Despite what the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called “such poor play that spectators switched to the other match,” Byers bested Travis to reach the U.S. Amateur final for the third time in five years. There, he defeated 1904 Olympic gold medalist George Lyon of Canada 2 up, becoming the first Western Pennsylvanian to raise the Havemeyer Trophy. 

Byers may have had an ace in the hole for his championship run: His caddie for the event was future two-time major champion and World Golf Hall of Fame member Jock Hutchison. Hutchison came to America at the request of William C. Carnegie, the nephew of steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. He taught the Carnegie family golf in the winter months at their Georgia home on Cumberland Island and spent the summer months at Carnegie’s New York area clubs. Carnegie was also a member at Allegheny and recommended Hutchison to Byers for both the Metropolitan and the U.S. Amateur, due to his experience at courses in the New York/New Jersey area. Hutchison would later work as Allegheny’s professional (1911 to 1917) before winning the 1920 PGA Championship and the 1921 Open Championship.

This proved to be a source of major controversy. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote, “The only regrettable feature of the day was the employment of a professional caddie, Jack Hutchison of St. Andrews, by Byers, who also had Hutchison in his service at the Metropolitan championship. On the face of things there was nothing objectionable about Hutchison’s work, but a most pernicious principle is involved.” There were calls for Byers to remove Hutchison before the final, and none other than A.W. Tillinghast offered to caddie for Lyon in the final if Hutchison remained on Byers’ bag. However, the Canadian gold medalist did not want to “change his luck,” leaving many to wonder what could have been if Tillinghast had caddied for him. 

In his 1907 U.S. Amateur title defense, Byers put up a valiant effort but fell to the eventual champion, Travers, in the semifinals at the Euclid Club. It would be his last deep run at the tournament. His final appearance came in 1916 at Merion Cricket Club, where he faced a 14-year-old wunderkind making his U.S. Amateur debut: Bobby Jones. Multiple accounts of the match state that the golf played that day was far from great, with the trailing group calling it a “juggling act” because so many golf clubs were thrown in anger. In fact, on the 12th hole, Byers reportedly chucked a club over the hedges and instructed his caddie not to retrieve it. Jones later stated that the only reason he won the match was that Byers had run out of clubs.

While his play nationally fell off, Byers remained a force at home. He won three more Western Pennsylvania Amateur titles (1908, 1912 and 1914) and finished runner-up on three other occasions, losing two of them to Fownes. He also lost to Harry Vardon twice more, both on Vardon’s 1913 tour with two-time major champion Ted Ray.

Through the war years and into the 1920s, Byers continued playing golf, running the family business and living what could safely be called a playboy lifestyle. Since 1901, he had run the Girard Iron Company in Ohio, a steelworks under the A.M. Byers Company umbrella. In 1909, he took over as president of A.M. Byers Company for his brother, Dallas. Eben Byers remained in control of the company until the mid-1920s, when his younger brother, J. Frederic Byers, took the reins after a stint as USGA president from 1922 to 1923. In Eben’s personal life, he had a reputation for being a ladies’ man and remained a lifelong bachelor.

Tragically, the men of the Byers family often found their lives cut short. Eben’s older brother, Alexander Byers Jr., unexpectedly passed away in 1899 at the age of 27. Overcome with grief, their father died the following year of a broken heart, many said. With the passing of A.M. Byers Sr., Dallas took control of the family business until he was struck by tragedy as well, dying from complications of a stroke while in France in 1909. J. Frederic also died suddenly, at age 67, during a business trip to New York in 1949.

Eben Byers’ gruesome end began in the fall of 1927. While attending the annual Harvard-Yale football game in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Byers injured his arm after falling from his train berth. Dr. Charles C. Moyar of Pittsburgh prescribed him Radithor, a radium-water mixture created by William J.A. Bailey. Labeled as a “cure-all,” it contained triple-distilled water with at least 1 microcurie of radium-226 and radium-228.

Over the next two years, Byers consumed an average of three bottles of Radithor per day. He felt rejuvenated. Not only did his arm cease to hurt, but he told friends he felt like a young man again. His life seemingly went back to normal. 

Until his teeth started falling out.

Similar to calcium, radium builds up within the bones. However, instead of strengthening the bone structure like calcium does, radium slowly eats it away. Most people who suffer from acute radium poisoning initially know something is wrong when they begin losing teeth and the openings do not heal. This was Byers’ first clue. Some experience “radium jaw,” a malady where the jaw bones disintegrate, requiring the removal of the jaw entirely. By the time of Winn’s visit, Byers’ upper jaw and most of his lower jaw were gone. Cancers riddled Byers’ body; he suffered debilitating headaches, and his kidneys were failing. Despite the best efforts of Byers’ New York physicians, he was living on borrowed time in severe pain.

On the evening of March 31, 1932, Eben Byers died in a New York hospital, with J. Frederic and sister Maude by his side. He was just 51 years old. An autopsy found that he had three times the lethal dose of radium in his body at the time of death. His estate, estimated at more than a million dollars by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was left to his brother and sister. His family interred him in Allegheny Cemetery, secured in a lead coffin to prevent radiation exposure to anyone who visited his grave. 

Byers’ death made national headlines. Every newspaper, from locals to The New York Times, covered the former U.S. Amateur champion’s tragic end. Dr. Moyar defended prescribing Radithor to Byers and countless other patients, but many still blamed him for Byers’ demise. Bailey, the mastermind behind it, never faced any criminal charges for Byers’ death, despite the damning testimony Winn was able to retrieve. Bailey was only forced to stop producing Radithor.

As of this writing, Byers’ six Western Pennsylvania Amateur titles remain third all-time. Add two West Penn Opens, a U.S. Amateur title and two U.S. Amateur runner-ups and his résumé is among the best of that era. Yet it is possible that he is remembered better for his passing. Thirty years after his burial, Byers’ death became part of a new study by Dr. Robley D. Evans of MIT. Evans was researching the effects of radiation exposure in humans, focusing on 21 living and eight deceased patients, including Byers. When his body was exhumed for the study, it was found to be just as radioactive as the day he had been entombed in the family mausoleum. •